


i'm young

by saraheli



Category: South Club (Band), Winner (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 12:00:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14790131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraheli/pseuds/saraheli
Summary: How can you make yourself forget? Remembering is all that makes him feel anymore; all that makes him breathe. What do you feel like? Do you smell the same? He returns at your beck and call, but did you really call, or did he just wish you to?





	i'm young

Hours of driving in a car perpetually stained new have the power to empty brains of their inhibitions. Taehyun knew this, and so he knew what to ignore. He knew to look away when he passed that flower shop down the road from your work, and he knew to turn a street early so that he wouldn’t imagine you behind the windows of that cafe where he had seen you for the first time. He knew you weren’t there.

But, the one sting he couldn’t avoid was that familiar view of your building from the sidewalk. It was pristine and white and it swirled up from the ground to house his worst fears. His fingers wrapped anxiously around what he had brought for you as he tapped the intercom.

“Who’s there?”

Your voice made his chest swell with heat, the feeling burning through him as he stepped away. He prayed you would recognize him, that you couldn’t forget either. You let him up.

The corridors all looked the same as they did the night he left you for the last time. It still smelled vaguely like cigarettes and Dior perfume and something else that used to smell brighter than it did now. Something of it was covered in dust, and he couldn’t tell how old it was. Had your home always been this gray?

He rapped his knuckles firmly against your door, but he couldn’t make that firmness mean more than it did: an air of confidence faking its way through him, gone the moment it caught wind of your presence.

Broken ice. Steely morning light made a halo behind your messy figure, unsorted into disarray by the hour and lack of forewarning. Taehyun’s lips parted noiselessly, a spirit in his throat begging to be released with a hello. He shivered.

You invited him inside with a sidestep and an uncertain nod. Your eyes surveyed him, looking for discrepancies in the photo projection that your mind made of him, but found nothing notable. This was both comforting and unsettling; he was the same dove that you had released, but a shadow was cast across it by something that you couldn’t see. He smelled like lavender and leather-bound seats and in-flight whiskey. Aftershave.

“You look the same,” you said, taking your usual seats across from one another at your kitchen table. “The hair’s still stupid.” You nodded towards him and an awkward smile broke across your mouth only to be tucked away again when his blankness continued.

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Please.”

He had always been soft-spoken with strangers, but you had never been one, and he was being far too polite for how you remembered him.

“Do you have any…”

You thought he might ask you for booze—he always did. At some point, he had stopped asking and started taking altogether. Your hand flew to the countertop as you turned to face him, preparing to tell him off.

“…ibuprofen?”

“Excuse me?”

“Um,” he shifted, “Painkillers? I have a…never mind, I don’t need them. Carry on.”

Taehyun looked timidly down at whatever sat carefully planted in his lap, and you stared at him. Broken ice. When you were across from him again, your fingers danced delicately against the glaze of your mug earning the surface hairline scratches and fractures from your discomfort. He wasn’t looking at you, nor you at him.

_Ting_.

A metallic sound rung in your ears, and the world seemed to cover in a layer of clear jelly. Your world was obscured by deviations in the sunlight as if its gleam were breaking across a frozen pond. Taehyun dunked below the surface—under the table—and you didn’t even need to look to know what he had retrieved. A piece of your heart from the wood paneling was tugged and slipped around his finger like the jewelry it had become.

Your ring.

You stood and returned to where you had been at the window before he had come. You winced at the sound of him standing and coming beside you.

“Why did you come?”

He whispered an apology that you almost didn’t hear; he had told you so many times that he was sorry. Sorry for drinking and sorry for coming and sorry for staying and sorry for going—sorry for all of the things he was doing because he couldn’t stop.

* * *

_“Well, why not?”_

_He hadn’t answered with anything more than a sorry then, either._

_“Am I not enough to make you want to stay?”_

_“And what about me?”_

_“What?”_

_“What about me, huh? Am I not enough for you not to look at him?”_

_You had stared up the stairs at him then, frozen in place and completely awestruck. You wished you didn’t know what he meant, and you wished that you could wash this grime from under your fingernails and out of your throat. You felt like you might puke and be emptied of your bile regrets just then._

_“That’s what I thought,” Taehyun hadn’t even sounded bitter when he’d said it. You had decided, now, that he had sounded empty._

* * *

And so neither of you was enough for the other.

“I couldn’t stop.”

You knew what he meant.

“You should go,” you sniffed hard and wiped at the pools of crystal shimmering on your cheeks in the sunlight.

His touch made you violent. You writhed in his arms and whimpered and, eventually, melted. You were weak, too. Broken ice. Frozen, and shattered by the same chill that had made you. You fought him and fought him until you faced him.

“Get out!” You pounded on his chest.

* * *

_“We have to get out of here,” you had giggled, pressing lukewarm kisses behind Taehyun’s ear. Your skin was bathed in suds and petals and candlelight, and he would have bet any amount of money that no one had ever seen anything so glorious in all of their time on Earth._

_“Why?” He chuckled when your dripping fingers pushed his hair from his eyes, tickling his scalp with gentle dew drops. It ran down the back of his neck and onto his bare shoulder, winding your essence sweetly in and out of him._

_“We’ll waste away right here if we’re not careful,” you hummed. Your cheek swelled over the porcelain tub’s lip, and your eyes smiled on him in the dim orange light._

_“I don’t know that I would terribly mind wasting away with you.”_

* * *

Hot kisses swallowed your plea, and they swallowed you next, encapsulating your crumbling body in flames that licked your dying inhibitions. Taehyun’s hands, strong and certain and desperate, held your face and dunked you into melancholia with him. You had missed his paper-thin hands and glass bones, but you couldn’t keep them then, and you couldn’t even feel them now.

“He’s coming,” you breathed. 

* * *

Taehyun left empty-handed that afternoon. His bones had been shot solid with lead-fillings and his skin was stained with dark blotches and patches with red and wet.

He supposed what had hurt the most was that he hadn’t been wrong. Something rotten in the pit of his stomach had begged for the universe to let him be wrong; he wanted to believe that he had made it up and that all of this had been his fault. He wanted to believe that only you had been hurt.

But the other man had come home to you that afternoon, and he had cradled you and almost, for a moment, Taehyun had wondered if you would leave him. He learned as he watched you two make love, trapped in your closet like the skeleton he was, that you never would.


End file.
